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Matter
discoverable by human understanding. We only feel a connection or determination of the thought to pass from one object to another. It follows therefore that the thought alone feels personal identity when, reflecting on the train of past perceptions that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together and naturally introduce each other".
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PSYCHOLOGICAL ATOMISM: ITS DIFFICULTIES
The above quotation from Hume puts the doctrine of the psychological individualism or atomism in a nut shell. But it hints at its difficulties as well. It raises the problem of "personal identity" and states that "the train of past perceptions compose a mind". This is similar to the Buddhist contention that the Ālaya-Vijñāna or the Vijñāna-Santāna which is a series of individual Vijñāna's or experiences is the self or the Atmā. Objections against the sensationist atomism have proceeded from the fact that our sense of personal identity is not a mere series of individual perceptions. Personal identity, as we feel it, involves a conscious principle which does not exhaust itself in a particular atom of experience but which has a permanent and abiding nature underlying the whole series of our passing experiences and manifesting itself in and through them. This conscious principle is ordinarily called Soul and the western philosophers generally make no distinction between Soul and Mind.
JAINA OBJECTION
In India, excepting that of the Çarvaka's, all the schools of philosophy including the Jaina have raised their voice against the Vijñāna-Vāda of the Buddhists. The objectors have contended that it is impossible for the momentary and the essentially disconnected experiences to form a connected series by themselves'.
I The Jaina commentator Akalanka points out that if the function of Manas is to consist, as it admittedly does--in judging the comparative goodness or badness of objects in recollections etc., it is impossible for it to be identified with 16
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